Tropico 3 Forum

Tropico 3 is a great game. However, it is a deep game that requires a lot of experimentation and digging into charts and graphs that might make your head scratch. Most of the gameplay concepts aren't explained completely enough during the tutorial or the campaign missions, so it would take a while for a beginner to grasp the whole concept. Generally, your first campaign mission will turn out crazy, probably end in a huge debt. That's normal, especially since you didn't know that you slowly lose money as your workers get paid through the year. (Thankfully, the game is addictive enough that you'll stick with it despite the learning curve.) Here I'm going to write all the stuff I know about Tropico 3 so that everybody's experience can be smoother. To simplify reading, I'll highlight some important things like best buildings to use.
 
(I haven't gotten all of the information yet so sometimes I will put a question mark (?) to info I don't know. )
 

BUILDINGS

 Buildings are the most important thing in Tropico that you can control. (The population you can't really do much about.) The tutorial will generally cover most of how to build structures and how to go about things in Tropico, but to know which buildings to construct is another matter.
 

HOUSING

 Buildings that your population will live in. Housing can hold tenants and each tenant can have one more person living with them. (Husband & wife usually.) Housing Quality of each building will affect your approval rating from the population. Little importance in early game, Medium importance in mid-game, Above Average to High importance in late game. You don't have to build houses next to roads since people can walk to their house without losing much productivity.

Name	Cost	Space Required	Housing Quality	Tenants	Comments
Shanty	$150	6x4	15	1	only holds 1 tenant for a 6x4 space, low housing quality. probably shouldn't bother building these
Bunkhouse	$500	6x3	25	3	holds 3 families.
Country House	$1000	4x5	50	2	middle quality house that holds 2 families
House	$2000	4x7	70	2	great quality house, 2 families. sounds good, but you'll need a ton of these to house everybody
Mansion	$4000 4MW	9x6	95	2	late game extremely high quality house. requires electricity (4MW), and houses 2 families. (build a few of these once your island is rich)
Tenement	$4000	7x8	38	12	This can be your workhorse building if you're trying to fit a ton of people really quick in small spaces. It holds 12 tenants but isn't amazing in house quality. I suggest going for Apartments even early on, skipping this entirely.
Apartment Block	$5000	6x8	60	6	this costs 1k more than Tenements, half occupancy, but nearly doubles the house quality. I highly recommend going for this and skipping Tenements early game
Condominium	$6000 6MW	4x7	85	4	a perfect replacement for Apartment Blocks late game. This bumps your house quality significantly to 85 and houses 2/3 your Apartment's dwellers. Since it occupies less space than Apartments, you can build more to compensate for the lack of occupants. Requires electricity to build and maintain.
Shacks	$0	1x1 (?)	?	1	these are like mushrooms that grow anywhere, people will build this if they can live nowhere else. You can't build this on your own. Costs nothing. Horrible Housing Quality. Late game you should strive to have 0 shacks

 

General Housing Strategy

 When you start a game, a Tenement is usually around for the immediate population. Make income-generating buildings first and skip suggestions about housing. (leave a decent sized area in the middle of your town for future housing, or where you see Shacks forming.) Once you have income, its time to work on some housing. Build a Diplomatic Ministry and use the USSR Development Aid edict, which will half the cost of all Tenements and Apartments. (You will need some passable relations with USSR, so maintain it early on.) Build Apartments in your major Shack areas to appease the population. I suggest setting the Rent to 1 and clicking the "assign to all similar buildings" button. This can serve you for your whole regime if you want, but in the late game when you have more money than you can spend and nothing to do, you can invest in Condominiums. Make sure to have ample electricity, then begin to demolish a few Apartments at a time, then replace them with Condominiums. Sometimes you can place more Condo's than the demolished Apartments because they use less space - so make sure to spend a second playing Building-Tetris. Even if you don't change the Rent on these, the population will love living in them. All of the other Housing types can be used if necessary, but the Mansion is a good way to increase Housing Quality approval in extreme late game.
 
 

FARMS & MINES

 Farms and Mines are your income creating, population feeding buildings that you will always need to build, especially early in the game. They generally require uneducated workers and produce decent profits in the early game. All of them create at least a minor amount of pollution. Most of them don't need to be built adjacent to Roads but they benefit from being accessible to the workers and Teamsters. People will travel to food-producing buildings to satisfy their hunger.

Name	Cost	Comments
Farm	$1500	All games generally start with 2 farms pre-built because this is your bread-&-butter way of feeding your people and exporting the excess for income. Crops available to grow are Corn, Banana, Papaya, Pineapple, Coffee, Tobacco and Sugar. Pineapple can be processed. Coffee, Tobacco and Sugar will be exported or processed but cannot feed your population. Farms will use a portion of its surroundings to plant its crops so leave space.
Ranch	$750	A ranch is like a farm that grows animals to feed and export. Available animals are Cattle, Goats & Llamas. Llamas aren't eaten but their fur is exported. Can be upgraded to make Smoked Beef. Ranches need grazing space for their animals so leave some space, preferably in a green Pasture zone.
Fisherman's Wharf	$3000	Built near the shore and sends out fishing boats to gather fish which can be eaten by your people or exported or processed. Check your Overlay to see where the fishing is best.
Logging Camp	$1500	A building that chops nearby trees and turns them into logs. Sells for export or processed into lumber. Can upgrade for faster production or tree regrowth. Adds some pollution. Don't build things around it too much so that trees will be available for chopping.
Mine	$3000	This building sends out miners to nearby pockets of deposits (see your Overlay) and slowly depletes them. Iron, Bauxite and Gold can be mined for export. Gold can be processed. 3 available upgrades for production. Adds significant pollution. Devaluates the land where the deposits are at. Mining is supposedly a good way to earn export profits. Don't build things on top of the mining deposit because the miners won't be able to get to it. Must be built next to a Road.
Oil Well	$8000	Place directly on top of a land-based oil deposit to export Oil Products for profit. Adds pollution. Requires College graduates as employees so take note before building one. Oil supposedly provides significant profits.

 

General Farming & Mining Strategy

 At the start of the game, hit the Pause button and click on the Overlay. Check your map for all the resources and possible farmland, mining, logging, ranchland, oil, etc. you can use. Make note of the deposits and decide if you want to pursue them later. Click on the two pre-built Farms and choose what product they should make. Pick an edible produce for each Farm and make sure they provide different food to improve your Food Diversity. Check their immediate surroundings for the best ones they can make. Next, while the game is still paused, find a suitable location for your other forms of uneducated exports. For example, if you want to build a logging colony, start by building Roads to that area and try to build your Roads in a way that won't cut out the trees you need. (Later on, read on how to build roadways more effectively.) I suggest on concentrating in one type of product for now. Going for a combination of Farm exports, Logs, and Iron and Oil isn't going to make sense once you turn your attention to Industry. Anyway, in some games the pre-built Port needs to be connected to your Road network first. Next, I suggest building a Garage near your Construction Office / Teamsters Office / Palace. This will significantly improve build times. Unpause the game and send your Presidente to the Garage build site to speed up construction. Now, create about 3-5 profitable structures like Farms / Mines / Logging Camps etc. in your new area and wait. Send El Presidente to improve speeds. At this point, you will probably have little money left or in debt. You will need to wait 'till the year rolls over to get some Financial Aid from the US & USSR. As your money slowly start to trickle in and your farmers/miners/etc. get acquainted with their new jobs, you should outfit the new area with a Garage & Teamsters Office, preferably next to each other. Since your workers are human, they will need to travel to town or some other places every now and then, adding transportation will improve their productivity because they don't spend half their lives walking to-and-from their work. Teamsters are also important because they are the ones who take your products from their buildings and bring them to the Dock for export. Giving them access to cars to-and-from your production buildings will improve exports greatly.
 
Personal Farming & Mining Strategy
 My playstyle concentrates on Sugar Farming > Rum Industry and nothing else. Yes, nothing else. There are many reasons for this style but suffice to say its the best in terms of profits, minimal pollution, and ease. (I believe its pretty easy and doesn't require a ton of micromanagement.) Follow the General Farming & Mining Strategy but your major goal is to create 3-5 Sugar Farms only. Find a good area for Sugar (doesn't even matter if its on the other side of your island, Rum exports is all worth it) and build your Road network to go there. If its particularly far, you can opt to build a Garage or Construction Office near there first. Once your infrastructure is in place, build about 3-5 Farms as money allows. Sugar money isn't amazing but you can go straight into Rum Distillery as soon as possible after the initial profits and after that will never have money problems for the rest of your time as El Presidente. (Explained more later on my Personal Industry Strategy.) 
 
 

INDUSTRY

 While basic exports can be profitable, it just doesn't sell high enough. To upgrade your economy to the next level, you need to build Industry buildings. These take raw materials and turns them into processed goods that sell for a lot more than basic commodities. Industry buildings require High School educated workers or better. Most upgrades require electricity. Some need to be connected to Roads but being accessible is always advantageous. It is recommended to build Industry buildings between your Raw Material producing buildings and your Port, preferably near Teamsters and Garages. This will make sure your Teamsters will pass by the Industry building and drop off the Raw Materials before going to the Port. And this will also ensure that your Industry exports are delivered as quickly as possible.

Name	Cost	Comments
Lumber Mill	$5000	Processes Logs from Logging Camps into Lumber. Lumber can be processed further into Furniture. Upgrades for less pollution, and productivity.
Cigar Factory	$10000	Takes raw tobacco leaves and rolls them into Cigars. Can be upgraded for less raw material use, job quality, and producing Machine Rolled Cigars which cost less but get processed faster.
Rum Distillery	$22000	The most expensive industry building is also a veritable Gold Mine so if you're ever going to build just one Industry, this should be it. Takes sugar products from Farms and brews them into Tropican Rum. Rum is one of the top export prices available. Can be upgraded for production and Spiced Rum, which sells for even higher.
Jewelry Factory	$13000	A jewelry factory will take Gold and turn them into Jewelry. Gold deposits in maps are generally small and will deplete before your game is over so make sure to take that into consideration. Upgrades available are for Job Quality, Faster Worker Experience, and Fine Jewelry, which is the highest priced export. Must be connected to a Road.
Furniture Factory	$17000	Furniture Factories are 2nd tier Industry buildings that require lumber from Lumber Mills to make furniture. This is the only product export that requires two buildings to process. Can be upgraded for Production, and Job Quality, but one upgrade's side effect is +50% Pollution. Must be connected to a Road.
Cannery	$15000	A Cannery is almost an all-in-one processing plant for a lot of products. It can take Coffee, Fishes and Pineapples for canning. If you spread out your raw material production into something that suits a Cannery, then you should invest in these. Upgrades for production and Freeze Dried Coffee, which sells higher.
Oil Refinery	$15000	The refinery is a beach-built building that will send out tankers to underwater oil deposits and collect them for export. Can be upgraded for extra storage and less pollution. Requires College graduates to operate. It doesn't require Raw Materials from other buildings to process. (However, I think it "refines" oil and sells it as a different Oil Product than the Oil Well. If so, Teamsters can probably take Oil Well products for "refining" here. Will need to check up on this.)

 

General Industry Strategy

 Once you've built your initial couple of Raw Material producing Farms/Mines/etc, stop building anything for a while and wait for some export profits. A decent turnout from about 4-5 Farms should give you around 15-20k on a good shipment. If you still aren't in huge debt yet, (I hope not) then build your first major Industry building as soon as possible. It doesn't matter if you'll end up with a little debt because once your Industry gets to work you'll should never have money problems again. Since you've built an area and concentrated on one type of export to process, your Industry building should be placed near your area closer to the Port than all your Raw Material producing buildings. This way, your Teamsters will pass it by and drop off the materials for processing. Most industries require High School graduates. Once the building is built, one or two workers might start to work there. These are usually Immigrants with High School diplomas because you haven't built a High School yet. They can also come from your Soldiers at the Palace and switched to Factory working instead. Since it should be early enough, there shouldn't be too many problems that require Soldiers. Let them be. As soon as you can, most probably once the first shipment of processed goods have been exported, you should immediately hire foreign experts on your Industry building, preferably fill it up with workers. (Since first export would usually give you 20k+.) A full factory is important to maximize your Industry efforts. Unless necessary, don't build more than one of the same Industry building because what would usually happen is that the workers from one building will just split-up to man the other building. After a year or so, consider buying non-electricity requiring upgrades for this one building. The best upgrades are the ones that make higher quality exports like Spiced Rum, Freeze Dried Coffee, Fine Jewelry (I think the latter two require electricity), also there's Machine Rolled Cigars if you need to produce more. Oil Refineries are different here because they don't require Raw Materials and don't apply to this build order. They also require College workers so consider them as non-options until late in the game.
 
Personal Industry Strategy
 <lorem ipsum for now>
 
 

Other Buildings Coming Soon(?)

 
 

For More Information

Other guides you can read about this game:
 
 http://www.gamespot.com/gamespot/guides/pc/tropico_gg/index.html - This is GameSpot's super old Tropico 1 guide. I've heard that Tropico 3 is hugely similar to Tropico 1 except in 3D but the similarities are surprising. This is pretty much a Tropico 3 guide made in 2001. Written by something called The Stratos Group and designed by someone named Collin Oguro.

 http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/955046-tropico-3/faqs/58392 - This is a Tropico 3 FAQ made by a GameFAQ's user named Lisanne.

@xMP44x: Thanks, man! When I started playing Tropico a couple weeks ago I was surprised how little information I could find about it. I thought for sure there would be a Prima Guide available. Had to stumble around playing the game doing trial-and-error to find out what the game mechanics were. I mentally noted some stuff so it made sense to put them in writing somewhere. I really hope this helps new players get down to the fun of this game sooner. With the demo out it can spell the difference between a purchase of the game or a hasty uninstall. Hehehe :P

@mfpantst: Oh, my bad for the late reply man! 
 
Let's see, I haven't played in a while so the way I remember the menus might be different. (I reformatted and I don't have Tropico installed yet.) 
 
 Let's see, if you believe you're producing enough food, then click the farm/ranch/etc then check out its outgoing amount. Watch some dude from the Teamsters office walk/drive to the building and all the outgoing amount should be gone. Watch the teamster go out of the building and where he goes with it. If everything is ok, then he should be dropping the food off at a Market or drive all the way to your port. Click your port and check for the amount of exports on there. Then wait for the big boat to pick up your exports. Make sure there are port workers too. He'll need to walk up to the port, operate the crane and once he drops the container onto the boat, your money should roll in. 
 
Cocaine or weed should totally be an option. Maybe make an edict that makes you an instant enemy to the US and makes the Church disrespect you for it, but earns a lot of money. You might need a hidden airport in the middle of the jungle sending out kilos of your stuff though. Haha.